By Ian Jobling • 8/19/09
A new scholar who is doing interesting work is Jason Richwine, a recent PhD graduate from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. As the AEI website informs us, Richwine’s area of specialization is the link between intelligence and public policy issues, including immigration. Richwine began publishing articles in current affairs magazines and websites this year. Although he never adopts an explicitly pro-white perspective, all of his articles have brought attention to topics that are crucial to this website: racial differences in intelligence, the failure of Hispanics to integrate into American society, and the relationship of intelligence to social and economic success. A new scholar who is doing interesting work is Jason Richwine, a recent PhD graduate from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. As the AEI website informs us, Richwine’s area of specialization is the link between intelligence and public policy issues, including immigration. Richwine began publishing articles in current affairs magazines and websites this year. Although he never adopts an explicitly pro-white perspective, all of his articles have brought attention to topics that are crucial to this website: racial differences in intelligence, the failure of Hispanics to integrate into American society, and the relationship of intelligence to social and economic success.
One of Richwine’s achievements has been to calculate the average IQ of various immigrant groups—he has provided far more detail on this matter than any other research I am aware of. His estimates apparently come from his dissertation and have not been published yet, but Steve Sailer got hold of them and posted them on his blog. The results are, for the most part, predictable, as the IQs of most immigrant groups are approximately the same as those of their home countries: Mexican immigrants have an average IQ of only 82, which is below that of American blacks, and Northeast Asians’ IQ is 106. The only surprise is the IQ of Indians. The average Indian IQ is 81, but Indian immigrants to the US have an average IQ of 112, leading them to become the nation’s “new model minority”, as Richwine wrote in a Forbes article. Hopefully, Richwine will publish the details of his research on immigrant IQ somewhere soon.
Richwine recently published in National Review a useful overview of American-born Hispanics’ failure to achieve socioeconomic parity with whites, a fact that will be well known to readers of this site, but which urgently needs to be publicized to the rest of the nation. Unfortunately, while Richwine is willing to discuss the high intelligence of Indians, low Hispanic intelligence is not mentioned in this article. So far in his published work on immigrant IQ, Richwine seems to be guided by the maxim that if you can’t say something nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all.
Richwine’s most original work is his other recent article, published on The American, on the relationship between intelligence and morality. Richwine works with Robert Putnam’s concept of “social capital,” which designates social networks based on trust and reciprocity. Putnam has found that cultures with high levels of social capital tend to be more economically successful and generally happier than those with low levels of trust. Where social capital is greater, Putnam says, “children grow up healthier, safer, and better educated; people live longer, happier lives; and democracy and the economy work better.”
Putnam has also found that ethnic and racial diversity is associated with lower social capital in the US. The more diverse an area is, the less trusting people are. As Putnam has written:
people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle… [They tend to] withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.
Richwine brings together scattered research findings proving that IQ and the capacity to build social capital are related. He refers to the Kohlbergian tradition of research in moral development that finds that high IQ people are more likely to reason about moral issues in a principled manner. I have written extensively about this relationship here.
Richwine also summarizes research proving that brighter people tend to be more altruistic than duller ones. Accordingly, brighter people are better able to build networks of trust and cooperation. Finally, Richwine brings in the well-known findings from The Bell Curve that bright people not only have higher educational achievement than dull ones, but are more likely to “avoid jail, stay married to a first spouse, maintain employment, and wait until marriage to have children.”
The relationship that Richwine demonstrates between intelligence and social capital casts familiar facts in a new light. Presumably, most of us are familiar with Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen’s finding in IQ and the Wealth of Nations that the average IQ of a nation is a very strong predictor of its wealth. The authors explain the relationship in terms of the economic benefits that intelligence itself brings, such as greater capacity for skilled labor. However, the economic success of high IQ nations may be just as much, if not more, owing to capacity for social capital. That is, it may be that high-IQ nations do better not merely because their inhabitants can learn more quickly, but because they are better able to form economically beneficial networks of trust and cooperation.
Richwine suggests that the link between IQ and social capital ought to inform our immigration policy: the negative effects of diversity on trust would be mitigated by restricting entry to high-IQ immigrants. Richwine is certainly not a pro-white thinker: he does not regard diversity as negative in itself… or perhaps we are too quick to make assumptions. After all, if Richwine did think diversity was inherently harmful, would he dare to say that in articles meant for National Review and Forbes? In his article on social capital, Richwine writes, “I am going to assume that some amount of immigrant diversity is valuable or inevitable, or both.” Diversity may not be valuable, it may just be inevitable—scarcely a ringing endorsement!
It is probably fortunate that Richwine does not engage in blatant racial advocacy, as doing so would likely kill his chances of being published in “respectable” magazines. Let’s just be glad that someone with high-powered educational credentials is getting this information out there and taking IQ research in a new direction.